176 BOOKS New Old Ways t . has leapedwith " astonishing speed in- to the front rank of fl I contemporary Eng- - lish novelists, and one has only to read his new book, "Anglo-Saxon Attitudes" (Viking), to see why. For here in this ill-named, immensely entertaining vol- lights of "Anglo-Saxon Attitudes" to older but still exceedingly vigorous discover how far that vein is from being "South Wind," published in 1917, worked out. Foremost among back- when Mr. Vilson was a bookish infant. ward-glancing writers, Mr. Wilson has The truth is that Mr. Wilson is a bit something of a pioneering air precisely too young for the literary company he because he is not breaking fresh ground, keeps, and now and then, in the winding For him, it has turned out that there is course of his novel, he may be seen pre- gold enough at home. One has simply tending to dodder when his first im- to clear away the rubbish and dig. pulse has been to caper. Nevertheless, Writing in a fashion so old that his his sympathy with Douglas, Huxley, ume are to be found in abundance the /ounger readers may well mistake it for and other worthy and durable elders is virtues that so much recent English fiction has lacked, has known it has lacked, and has tended to make helpless, languishing gestures over the lack of. The?- are the ordinary-sounding but crucial literary virtues--energy, obser- vation, inventiveness, convictionby means of which a writer shapes a world from the nearest handful of dust and breathes into it the gift of seeming life, and without them the other, more ex- quisite literary virtues are not worth a straw. Being notably endowed with virtues of both sorts, Mr. Wilson has achieved his place in the front rank with ease; "Anglo-Saxon Attitudes" is only his second novel, and the remainder of his work consists of two volumes of short stories and a study of Zola. The fact that the front rank is, at the moment, rather peaked-looking (in some of Mr. Wil- son's peers, the indis- pensable will to create life has shrunk to a mere querulous velleit? ) may lessen Mr. Wilson's pleasure in being there, but not by much. Be- lind him in the long his- tory of the English nov- el are plenty of outsize figures to measure him- self against. Indeed, since he has the supreme literary virtue of ambi- tionbut for the delu- sion of being God, a writer would do better to lay bricks--Mr. Wil- son may actually pre- fer to be judged in com- parison not with his contemporaries but with his predecessors. Theirs is the great vein that he is working, after all, and it is one of the de- a new one, Mr. Wilson is in some danger of being overpraised for putting into use characteristics of the novel that, in its best days, are never out of use. In content and diction, "Anglo-Saxon At- titudes" is obviously the product of the middle nineteen-fifties, but in form and perfectly genuine. He shares with them not only a point of view toward the novel but a point of view toward life. Like them, he sees it as outrageous and vet he remains infatuated by itit repels him and invites him and he can- not let it go. Out of this fearful rela- especially in tone this big, complex, and tion comes comedy, and Mr. Wilson carefully rendered novel might be is, above everything, superbly comic. thought to date from a much earlier time. It reminds one of Huxley's "Point Counter Point," now nearly thirty years old, on whose magnificent opening sec- tion the opening section of "Anglo- Saxon Attitudes" appears to be mod- "Anglo-Saxon Attitudes" will make its readers laugh out loud, then leave them wondering whether what they have laughed at might not equally well have broken their sill?, hearts. The hero of "Anglo-Saxon Atti- elled, and of Norman Douglas's still tudes" is an aging professor of history "I hope you're rght, but I have an uneasy feeling it isn't just a passing craze."